With high-speed wireless services increasingly in demand, there is a need for more throughput per bandwidth to accommodate more subscribers with higher data rates while retaining a guaranteed quality of service (QoS). In point-to-point communications, the achievable data rate between a transmitter and a receiver is constrained by the available bandwidth, propagation channel conditions, as well as the noise-plus-interference levels at the receiver. For wireless networks where a base-station communicates with multiple subscribers, the network capacity also depends on the way the spectral resource is partitioned and the channel conditions and noise-plus-interference levels of all subscribers. In current state-of-the-art, multiple-access protocols, e.g., time-division multiple access (TDMA), frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA), code-division multiple-access (CDMA), are used to distribute the available spectrum among subscribers according to subscribers' data rate requirements. Other critical limiting factors, such as the channel fading conditions, interference levels, and QoS requirements, are ignored in general.
The fundamental phenomenon that makes reliable wireless transmission difficult to achieve is time-varying multipath fading. Increasing the quality or reducing the effective error rate in a multipath fading channel may be extremely difficult. For instance, consider the following comparison between a typical noise source in a non-multipath environment and multipath fading. In environments having additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), it may require only 1- or 2-db higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using typical modulation and coding schemes to reduce the effective bit error rate (BER) from 10−2 to 10−3. Achieving the same reduction in a multipath fading environment, however, may require up to 10 db improvement in SNR. The necessary improvement in SRN may not be achieved by simply providing higher transmit power or additional bandwidth, as this is contrary to the requirements of next generation broadband wireless systems.
One set of techniques for reducing the effect of multipath fading is to employ a signal diversity scheme, wherein a combined signal is received via independently fading channels. Under a space diversity scheme, multiple antennas are used to receive and/or send the signal. The antenna spacing must be such that the fading at each antenna is independent (coherence distance). Under a frequency diversity scheme, the signal is transmitted in several frequency bands (coherence BW). Under a time diversity scheme, the signal is transmitted in different time slots (coherence time). Channel coding plus interleaving is used to provide time diversity. Under a polarization diversity scheme, two antennas with different polarization are employed for reception and/or division.
Spatial diversity is commonly employed in modern wireless communications systems. To achieve spatial diversity, spatial processing with antenna arrays at the receiver and/or transmitter is performed. Among many schemes developed to date, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and beamforming are the two most studied and have been proved to be effective in increase the capacity and performance of a wireless network. (see, e.g., Ayman F. Naguib, Vahid Tarokh, Nambirajan Seshadri, A. Robert Calderbank, “A Space-Time Coding Modem for High-Data-Rate Wireless Communications”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 16, no. 8, October 1998 pp. 1459-1478). In a block time-invariant environment, it can be shown that in a system equipped with Nt transmit antennas and Nr receive antennas, a well designed space-time coded (STC) systems can achieve a maximum diversity of Nr*Nt. Typical examples of STC include space-time trellis codes (STTC) (see, e.g., V. Tarokh, N. Seshadri, and A. R. Calderbank, “Space-time codes for high data rate wireless communication: performance criterion and code construction”, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 44:744-765, March 1998) and space-time block codes from orthogonal design (STBC-OD) (see, e.g., V. Tarokh, H. Jafarkhani, and A. R. Calderbank, “Space-time block codes from orthogonal designs”, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 45:1456-1467, July 1999.)
Since the capacity and performance of an MIMO system depends critically on its dimension (i.e., Nt and Nr) and the correlation between antenna elements, larger size and more scattered antenna arrays are desirable. On the other hand, costs and physical constraints prohibit the use of excessive antenna arrays in practice.